


the pacific is your home now

by spookykingdomstarlight



Category: The Leftovers
Genre: Could Be Construed As Dubious Consent, Dreams, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Kissing, M/M, Mentions of Blood, Mentions of Nora Durst/Kevin Garvey Jr., POV Second Person, Post-Canon, Self-cest, Sex And Death Going Hand In Hand, Spoilers, Suicidal Ideation, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, mentions of cannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-19 20:20:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18977665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/pseuds/spookykingdomstarlight
Summary: He doesn’t always do this, complain, and you’re not certain what instigates it this time, but your hands fist in his jacket anyway, tug insistently on his tie to pull him toward you. You taste iron on your tongue and the tang of salt follows shortly thereafter, as familiar on your lips as his.That’s less unusual, the tears.





	the pacific is your home now

You have strange dreams sometimes. That’s not surprising to you, though. Most people still have dreams, will always have dreams. Some are even stranger than yours surely: more violent, more incomprehensible, more everything. For a while, before finding Nora, you didn’t dream at all. Those were good nights. You didn’t feel so much like you were cheating back then.

There was nothing to cheat on admittedly, but even so.

You’ve started to look forward to the dreams is the problem. They’re so, so much like the countless times you’ve died and there is comfort in that. The songs are all the same, the people, the same. You see Evie there sometimes, though you don’t speak with her: John no longer needs you to. You see Patti, too, and you stay as far away from her as possible. Though you’ve seen her bleeding and drowned and obliterated by the holy fire of nuclear detonations, you don’t think the two of you have much in common anymore.

In truth, you’re afraid of her. You barely want to be pulled into your own bullshit, but you certainly don’t want to be pulled into hers.

You know this isn’t actually hell or purgatory nor even heaven. The people who are dead here are not the truly dead; they’re merely the shadows that remain inside your head. They shouldn’t be able to hurt you, but you’re uncertain enough about Patti that you hesitate when she’s around.

Besides, you are far too busy stalking more important prey. You are dressed to the nines in a fitted suit some dreamland tailor’s made for you: bespoke at its finest. It fits like nothing else and you’d bring it back if you could. Nothing in the real world matches.

If only you didn’t have to kill people to earn this armor. Not that you do that these days. Mostly you stalk yourself across Australia—still Australia, you think it’ll always be Australia now. He’s the president of the United States of the inside of your mind and he’s stuck in Australia. Once, he told you he hated it here and wished you’d pick somewhere the fuck else in which to haunt him. Maybe the Caribbean. Maybe fucking Canada. Who cared? Anywhere but _fucking_ Australia.

You don’t want to know why he’s so adamant and you want to pretend you don’t know why you feel so guilty about that, but there are only so many truths you can ignore before your structural integrity fails. You can afford to face this one. Disappointing yourself isn’t so very difficult after all. You’ve had a lot of practice at that.

Take me somewhere nice for once, Kevin, he’ll say when you find him. That’s how you always start.

In the end, he’ll scoff and do the taking. Today it’s Bushrangers Bay because he’s a pretentious fuck who pretends he hates going anywhere anybody else likes to go and can’t admit he thinks those candy-colored beach huts at Brighton are cute. As though the jagged rocks and turquoise pools and the fact it’s barely outside of Melbourne wouldn’t guarantee a wide swath of visitors who also think they’re cool and clever. There’s no one here now—a certain sign that this is a dream—except for him in shades of white and cream, poised on one of the outcroppings, as dignified as a model in an ad for expensive watches that promise mystery and excitement to the purchaser.

Your blood doesn’t stain the front of his suit when he turns, an improvement over previous visits. He no longer looks like a model. He just looks like you.

“Did you know they filmed _Where The Wild Things Are_ here?” you ask. You kick at loose, dark pebbles with the toe of your expensive leather shoe. For your trouble, you manage to scuff the side of it. Somewhere, a cobbler is crying over the loss.

His eyebrow climbs his forehead, wrinkling his skin in about seven different ways that make you feel old as hell because he’s you and there’s gray in his hair. It sprinkles his beard, too. You feel as tired as he looks. “Fuck no.” His mouth twists unhappily. “How the fuck do you even know that?”

You only realize once he asks that you don’t know the answer, not the exact answer anyway. Shrugging, you show your hands. “Dunno. Maybe I read it somewhere.” You don’t tell him that you read travel blogs and check Instagram sometimes. If he notices the verisimilitude of the place, he doesn’t say anything. He’s not the sort to notice that neither of you have been here in person. In his place, you wouldn’t either. You try to smile and you try not to miss the one time in the whole damned span of eons that humanity has existed when you were on the same page. It was so long ago. You miss carrying the nuclear launch key in your chest. “Cool, huh?”

He rolls his eyes, but you don’t miss the way his mouth twitches beneath the beard you wish he’d get rid of. Nora’s not here to impress and anyway she prefers you smooth-faced now. You never ask him to shave, though. What if he wakes up instead of you, now looking too identical, confusing to your psyche? What would he do out there?

He deserves a chance at life as much as you, but you don’t know how to give it to him.

“Not really,” he’s saying, mouth moving almost in slow motion it seems. An artifact of the dream, you’ve noticed. There’s always that one moment before he makes a move where time slows down. Nothing to worry about. And then he’s reaching for you, ruining the line of your suit with fumbling hands. The jacket falls into the water, floats on the surface until it finally sinks under the weight of that water flooding across the sleek wool. Once it’s played tug-of-war with the tide, it’ll lose and wind up washed out to sea. That’s okay. There’s another one waiting for you in your hotel if you don’t wake up first.

Just once, you’d like to not wake up first.

“Fuck it,” he says and there’s a witty retort on your tongue, nothing new in the realm of witty retorts, but it amuses you anyway and you almost laugh. Experience tells you, however, there are better things you could be doing with your tongue, so you hold it, waiting for the payoff. He’s as impatient as you, won’t keep you waiting long.

Nobody understands you, not even you on your best days, but he’s as close as you’ve ever come to finding someone who does.

It should be Nora. Or if not Nora, then Laurie. It shouldn’t be a figment of your imagination playing at playing you. But here you are, working with what you’ve got. Some things don’t change.

He’s got your shirt open and the only scar he finds is from where the pacemaker’s been inserted. His thumb skims back and forth across the raised skin. An ache spreads beneath your breastbone from just below your heart. It’s not a heart attack, nowhere near, you know what those feel like and this isn’t it. You know what this is and you wish—you wish for something you know you shouldn’t want.

This is the grand unifying theme of your life: wishing for things you shouldn’t want. Or, worse, getting them and running from them and running toward them again and running away again and again and again. Over and over. People are supposed to grow over time, but you think that’s bullshit. Everyone backslides in the end. That’s all this is, but you can’t stop yourself anyway.

All you can hope is you’ll one day find the courage to trudge forward again. Regain all that ground you’ve lost.

At least nobody recognizes what’s happening in your waking hours. No one knows. No one will know because no one wants to.

Nobody wants to see it and that’s fine with you. You’ve gotten good at loving the things you have and fear losing it all again means you won’t rock the boat. You won’t be unhappy. You’ll just be empty inside. No, not empty. Nothing so melodramatic as that. You’ll just live a sense inside of you that you’re not whole, not when you know what it’s like to cut into your own skin and spill your own blood for your sins, a relief after so long.

There’s nothing in the world that compares with that feeling, nothing at all.

“You think I like doing this?” he asks, nail scraping across your skin. He might as well wield a scalpel for how deeply you feel it. “You come here day after day to have me carve you into pieces.” His eyes narrow. A sneer curls across his mouth. It’s not cruel. At least, it’s not a cruelty aimed at you. In all the ways that matter, he’s you. Of course he turns that shit inward. A thought comes to mind and you think to say it, but then his mouth is pressed against yours and there’s no time to speak.

Meg was wrong to call him cold. That’s not who he is at all.

He doesn’t always do this, complain, and you’re not certain what instigates it this time, but your hands fist in his jacket anyway, tug insistently on his tie to pull him toward you. You taste iron on your tongue and the tang of salt follows shortly thereafter, as familiar on your lips as his.

That’s less unusual, the tears.

_This is sad_ , you think. But not sad enough to stop. Never that. One day. One day you’ll stop. One day you won’t need this anymore. Or maybe one day he won’t and he’ll just stop showing up. That’d be nice. At least it would take the option out of your hands. What would you do if you couldn’t find him on suspiciously abandoned beaches across Australia anymore? Would you wake up refreshed? Would you pull Nora close and remind yourself that you love her?

Would you be better off?

You’re afraid you wouldn’t be. In truth, you’re afraid you’d be the worse for it. That’s why you keep coming back, isn’t it? It’s why you don’t talk to anyone about it.

You need his hands on you, in you. You need to be reminded what dying feels like because it hasn’t happened in so long and the memories are getting hazy around the edges. You like to think he needs to be reminded what killing feels like, that he gets something out of these meetings. There’s no other Kevin out there on the other end of your presidential doppelgänger, you don’t think, but the thought gets you through metaphorically unscathed.

“How do you want it this time?” He drawls the question. His hands yank the belt from your hips, are steady as they pull at your fly. His beard prickles the sensitive skin just under your jaw, follow the line of your muscles to the base of your throat. You’d have him tear the tendons from your neck, rip your carotid arteries free, chew through the gristle that surrounds your vertebrae. Paint the ocean, the sand, his suit, in your blood. You don’t care. You _don’t care_.

“Anything,” you say instead, desperate, eager to see what he has in mind. Some days, he knows you better than you know yourself. Sometimes, he’s gentle. If he is, you will be useless when you wake up. If he’s gentle, you won’t be able to stop him.

(You won’t want to stop him, but he doesn’t know that.)

(At the end of the day, it won’t matter. You’ll wake up regardless. You’ll get through another day. You’ll sleep and then you’ll wake up again. Day after day after day.)

(You regret that fact more often than you’d like.)


End file.
